Cadets of Valor Leadership Academy awarded for excellence
By Joyette Mills-Ward
Business Reporter SKNVibes.com
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – CADETS of the Valor Leadership Academy (VLA) 2008 Summer Leadership Program received awards for excellence in various disciplines at a ceremony held on 13 August at the Cayon Community Centre.
The Valor Leadership Academy 2008 Summer Leadership Program ran for five weeks and took place at the Irish Town Primary School between July 21 and 13 August, allowing children between the ages of 10 and 15 to gain exposure to training in academics, leadership courses, counselling and life skills, and wealth creation strategies as well as social education through a series of field trips.
The academic course content included classes in Reading, Writing, Mathematics, and Computer Technology, while leadership courses allowed the cadets to discover and develop their leadership skills.
The counselling and life skills offered the children a chance to ‘understand who they were’ and ‘how to succeed in life’ based upon a Temperament Analysis Profile completed by Dr Phyllis Carter- Pole, a licensed Clinical Counsellor and president of the Valor Leadership Academy. The 13 attendees were exposed to the financial expertise of Glen Pole, the Chief Executive Officer of the 
Academy who showed them ‘how to save and invest’ early in life.
The CEO, who is also one of the founders of VLA spoke to SKNVibes.com about its governing principles and said, “Everything we do at Valor Leadership Academy is biblically aligned. We teach the children to tell the truth at all times and also the importance of two key virtues - character, which is doing the right thing when no one is looking, and integrity, which is being a man or woman of your word.”
G. Pole, in explaining the reason for selecting St Kitts and Nevis to start another Valor Leadership Academy revealed that when the venture began four years ago in St. Thomas they “always had a Caribbean vision”.
“This is the natural progression of the expansion of our vision. The similarity between the problems being experienced by youth in St Thomas and St Kitts also impacted this decision.”
~~Adz:Left~~ He said he was led to do this “by his Creator” and besides having many relatives in the federation he felt that there was a tremendous amount of potential here. “I want to give something back, especially to the place where my father and my wife were born,” he expressed.
G. Pole said that he was in the process of building partnerships with several local private sector firms including Al Barker of Barker & Kelly, TDC, Trevor Fraites of Fraites Construction and Carlton DuPont of DuPont’s Jewellery.
“We’re doing this because we believe that no society could be sustained long-term without an effective partnership between family, faith-based groups, government and business. We all bring different things to the table.
The government should basically set the policy, the businesses should obviously bring the dollars and know-how and the faith-based groups bring a strong component of spirituality. Families represent the bedrock of the society and without them we are nowhere; so everything should be built around the family. You fix the family, you fix society, and if you fix the fathers you fix families,” Pole posited.
The Valor Leadership Academy was founded four years ago in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. by the husband and wife team of Glen Pole, an Investment Banker who previously worked on Wall Street in the USA and Dr. Phyllis Carter-Pole a licensed Christian Clinical Counsellor. The team met whilst growing up in St. Thomas and while both have ancestry in St. Kitts or Nevis, Carter-Pole was born in Sandy Point but left the island while still a child.
